Variant of Lola, a Spanish diminutive of Dolores meaning 'sorrows,' also associated with the Virgin Mary.
Lolah is a warmly unconventional spelling of Lola, itself a Spanish diminutive of Dolores — a name whose full form, María de los Dolores ("Mary of the Sorrows"), honors one of the most poignant of the Virgin Mary's devotional titles. The tradition of shortening Dolores to Lola was so prevalent in 19th-century Spain that "la Lola" became practically a type: the vivacious, dark-eyed flamenco dancer, the spirit of Andalusian femininity unconstrained.
That archetype was both celebrated and sensationalized in European art, most famously in Henri Toulouse-Lautrec's cabaret posters and in the figure of Lola Montez, the Irish-born dancer whose affairs scandalized half the crowned heads of Europe in the 1840s. Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel "Lolita" gave the name a complicated literary shadow for decades, but popular culture has largely reclaimed it through figures like Lola Bunny, the character from "Space Jam," and the Kinks' 1970 hit "Lola." The variant spelling Lolah adds a soft, almost dreamy trailing breath to the name, echoing the aesthetic of names like Delilah and Elorah. In the 2010s and 2020s, Lola surged back into fashion charts in the UK, Australia, and the United States, shedding its "retro-exotic" associations and settling into something simply joyful — a name that sounds like a laugh and lands like a hug.